Earlier quoted context omitted.
No Perl but there's rc, awk and aux/* helper tools which can do tons of stuff Perl does but without calling tons of CPAN modules. 9front ships an IRC client made with rc, awk and aux/trampoline to connect (and tlsclient for TLS connections). On horoscopes, there's 9ching and tarico at https://shithub.us =)
I mean, the point here is the standardized input/output system that leta everyone build programs without knowing each other that more or less interoperate.
That's Unix philosophy and 9front perfected it to the extreme. The bundled IRC client it's a shell script with two network helpers, one for plain conns and other one for TLS.